Email marketing is the most immediate, flexible and cost effective marketing tool available in business today. Done well, email marketing is a strategic process that can and will:

• Increase your sales
• Reduce your marketing costs
• Build customer loyalty
• Shorten your sales cycle
• Generate more referrals
• Save time by automating your marketing

Whatever your business - your customers are your greatest asset!

The ability to effectively communicate, grow and build relationships with your customers is vital to the success of your business. Email Marketing is the perfect solution to acquiring, building and maintaining profitable lifetime relationships with your customers.

It gives you the power to pro-actively send your message to your clients, web visitors and prospects instantly without passively waiting for them to contact you or to re-visit your website.

To grow your business using email marketing you should aim to have an email address for every customer and gather those of prospects and website visitors as well. Entice website visitors and prospects to leave their email address by offering a free gift, a discount or a newsletter - something that will be of value to them. If they have arrived at your website they have already shown interest so with some clever thinking this should be an easy process.

Ensure your email communications are professional, interesting and of value to the recipients. Don’t waste the opportunity to build lifetime customers by sending out rubbish. Some possible email communications could include newsletters, special offers, last minute deals, product information and updates, staff newsletters, invitations, after sales emails and personal greetings.

Once you start building your email database you’ll need to consider your options for administering campaigns. Successful email marketing is more than setting up a distribution list in Outlook and sending a broadcast email to all your contacts. Among other things you’ll want to ensure your compliance with legal requirements for commercial email messages. If email marketing is to be a serious Marketing tool for your business it is worth investing in specialized tools or using a professional service provider.

Finally, get creative and have some fun coming up with promotion and communication ideas. If you have some long term loyal customers ask them what they’d like to receive and take a look at what other businesses are sending their clients. You may just find you can offer something far superior and by using email you can do it a fraction of the cost of other advertising mediums.